James Gleick's new book "The Information" devotes an entire chapter to the fascinating story of Ada Byron. I've read thoroughly about her life (we did, after all, name our youngest daughter after her) but nothing makes her genius come to life like Gleick.
I wish more young women knew about Ada Lovelace. She attempted to do something entirely unprecedented and in her very short life understood the implications of computing technology.
What's even cooler is that her program had no bugs.
My wife recently opened my eyes to the idea that the low rate of female to male programmers is far more cultural than genetic. I found a link, in fact, that speaks more to this:
It almost certainly is cultural. I'm in a graduate level SE program, and it is mostly made up of South Asian international students, perhaps 60% of whom are females.
It could perhaps be both cultural and genetic. Women are genetically predisposed to prefer one sort of profession to another, and over the years as programming has changed it has increasingly become one sort of profession rather than the other.
Or to put it another way, many women love doing Sudoku puzzles. But if solving Sudoku puzzles suddenly became economically productive and a huge market for Sudoku-solving professionals suddenly sprung up, I bet the vast majority of jobs in the industry would suddenly be filled with young men with limited social skills but l33t Sudoku abilities.
Ada Lovelace had the good fortune to live when computer programming was a drawing room game for well-brought-up young ladies.
Sorry this is just sexist. And people like you who harbor and propagate sexist ideas like this are holding back our field.
Princeton's President Shirley Tilghman once said the following and I think it's a fitting quote that speaks directly to people like you.
"There are 25 years of good social science that demonstrate the many cultural practices that act collectively to discourage women from entering and continuing careers in science and engineering. The research is overwhelming, and it is there for anybody to see. On the other hand, the data that would suggest there are innate differences in the abilities of men and women to succeed in the natural sciences are nonexistent."
If you believe this idea is false, why do you need to label it as a taboo thought-crime ("sexist")? (I didn't think that it was expressed in an aggressive or especially irrational way, in which cases some criticism might have been warranted).
If you believe this idea is false, why do you need to label it as a taboo thought-crime ("sexist")?
Expressing false ideas is not without cost. We have generation after generation of young women who are socially and culturally conditioned into believing that they're are unsuited for careers in science and engineering. The grandfather is another example of one the many insidious ways in which this happens. As a result, I believe it's completely unacceptable to speculate on these matters, especially when all you have to offer are some sexist opinions unsupported by data.
Furthermore, the labeling of the post as sexist is not a "taboo thought-crime", it's a statement of fact. The OP is clearly claiming that young men are better suited to succeed at programming today than women. What is this if not "a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women?" [1]
[1] (sexist) male chauvinist: a man with a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women
I presume that you will be around to cry foul every time someone claims women are better at dealing with interpersonal relations?
It's a debatable empirical question whether men or women have any innate advantage (or are statistically more likely to have an advantage) in any given field. If the evidence points one way, does that make reality sexist?
Young men are better suited to succeed at professional football today than women. What is this if not "a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women?" Simple answer: it's an objective fact.
I find it amazingly unlikely that men and women are identically suited to every type of work. Men and women have historically, on evolutionary time scales, focussed on different types of activities.
You say "I believe it's completely unacceptable to speculate on these matter". That is labeling something as an unacceptable thought. You're saying "I don't care what reality it, my morality trumps reality." You are advocating creating categories of taboo thought crime. I suggest you either reconsider the implications of you views, or admit that this is what you are advocating.
You're saying "I don't care what reality it, my morality trumps reality."
I said I'm against unsupported speculation, not against data. We have plenty of good reasons, supported by data, to believe that men make better professional footballers.
I am not aware of any peer-reviewed study that shows men are better suited to computer programming that women. What I said was that throwing around speculation in the absence of data was prejudice and I stand by this.
I also did not make the claim that men and women are equally suited to every type of activity. However, making the leap from "there might be some activities for which men are statistically better than women" to "computer programming is once such activity", especially in the absence of evidence in the form of rigorous peer-reviewed studies supporting your position, is sexism.
That is labeling something as an unacceptable thought.
You're free to think what you want. However, I suggest that you examine your thoughts closely and study whether there is any truth to them before posting them on a public forum. I'm asking for honesty not thought-policing.
> "I find it amazingly unlikely that men and women are identically suited to every type of work. Men and women have historically, on evolutionary time scales, focussed on different types of activities."
Vague statements with no justification or data; just as subjective as someone "feeling" the other way.
> "I suggest you either reconsider the implications of you views, or admit that this is what you are advocating."
False dichotomy. The parent has many options: to do neither, to clarify the context you stripped from the quote, or perhaps offer the data this discussion is lacking.
Here is a paper to jump-start the discussion about achievement gaps in general, which talks about ethnicity and gender:
The OP is clearly claiming that young men are better suited to succeed at programming today than women. What is this if not "a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women?" [1]*
Actually I was claiming that young men are more likely to be interested in programming today than women. The culture of what it means to be a programmer has changed, and the idea of spending ten hours a day slinging Javascript around in order to query some database appeals to a fairly limited subset of the population, who tend overwhelmingly to be male. Whether this subset are the lucky few or the unlucky few is rather a matter of interpretation.
Like I said: Sudoku is fun when you do it for ten minutes a day. But doing it for a living would alienate the vast majority of people, and I'm fairly sure that the few who would be left to fill in those square for $120K a year would be mostly men.
ten hours a day slinging Javascript around in order to query some database appeals to a fairly limited subset of the population, who tend overwhelmingly to be male.
But doing it for a living would alienate the vast majority of people
As I said before these are just unsupported claims. And even if these claims were true, this doesn't mean that there is any genetic predisposition of any sort. In short, there's a lot of data to be gathered and analyzed before one confidently make such claims. In the absence of this data, claims like these are also known by the word prejudice.
I reiterate that I believe that your statements perpetuate cultural stereotypes that discourage women from entering careers in science and engineering.
I'd rather you didn't throw these unsupported claims out that IMHO serve no constructive purpose and simply muddy the water with apparently sexist views.
I seldom ever ask for 'citations' but in this instance the author makes a sweeping claim about everyone missing the mark when it comes to Ada Augusta, and then proceeds to quote the bulk of the existing work---none of which 'misses' anything. Color me confused...
The author believes that calling Lovelace "the first programmer" is an exaggeration, as it seems to imply that Babbage conceived of and made plans for his engine without ever having considered programs for it. Even Wikipedia says:
Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as
the first algorithm intended to be processed by a
machine; as such she is sometimes portrayed as the
"World's First Computer Programmer".
On the other hand, the article asserts:
Calling Lovelace the first programmer has always seemed
a bit silly because surely Babbage would have written
some programs for his machine. But recognizing her for
"Lovelace's Leap" seems far more realistic.
So he claims that the depiction given by Wikipedia (among other sources) misses the importance of her insight.
I believe the bit JGC quotes comes from Ada Lovelace's translation of Federico Luigi's memoir on the Analytical Engine (which, as the story goes, she supplemented with her own notes at the suggestion of Babbage). Am I mistaken here?
Is it clear from primary sources whether this should be called Lovelace's Leap, Luigi's Leap, or even Babbage's Bound?
Yes, the quote in question comes from her notes. (IIRC, Lovelace's addenda are actually longer than the original translated text. She had the advantage of being friends with Charles Babbage.)
What do you mean? Numbers in functional programming? If you really want them, I suppose you could implement them using the Church encoding.
Really, though, I'm surprised you'd want to consider doing it. These "numbers" sound far too involved and elaborate for the lambda calculi and their children. Better stick to the tasks functional programming was designed for, like writing fixpoint combinators and being snide in comment threads. ;)
<friday_flight_of_fancy> Ah, Ada, Ada! I wish I was born about 150 years ago, to a wealthy family, near Bath perhaps, and get to first see you at an evening gathering and thinking you're ravishing go over and strike a conversation, be flabbergasted by the breadth of your ideas and intellectual prowess, be hopeless enamoured with you. We would sit in your study and you would explain to me, starry eyed, the marvelous future of these computing looms, how they will change humanity and the universe. Maybe you wouldn't die so young then! </friday_flight_of_fancy>
http://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/03...
It's on Kindle. Just go buy it now. The Ada stuff is in Chapter 4, location 1841. It won't disappoint.